11 Questions with Michael Poma

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football scouting journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Michael Poma, creator of @WSOCViz

How did your first opportunity in football come about?

I’m still trying to figure out how to break in on a full-time level, but I started out coaching at a local youth club to start gaining experience as a coach. Coaching there I started to learn more on how to communicate within the game specifically between the coach – player relationship as well as coach – coach.

After coaching youth for a while, I got connected with coaches at the James Madison University’s women’s program, which is also my university as an undergrad. I began helping out with some more simple analysis in the Fall of 2017 and then when a new coaching staff led by Josh Walters came in the Spring of 2018, I really dug out the role I do now with controlling almost all facets of analysis within the program.

What attracted you to scouting/analytics? What’s more intriguing now names or numbers?

The first part that attracted me to analytics was really just from a younger age it was how I best made sense of the game. I have never really understood why people just go along with many of the old sayings that get bounced around without a second thought, whereas I sort of started to question how real these are. When I got into using analytics it was really as a tool to answer questions I had about the game and I have run with it from there.

Most of the time I’ll run some code or numerical analysis prior to video, but that isn’t always the case. It works best when you can mesh both worlds together and that is always what I tend to do. The best way I have done with this so far, is through using simple coding to link raw event data from python to convert into a SportsCode XML. When writing the code, the FC R Stats SportsCodePy code on github was really useful tool because they have a publicly available code already.

Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?

I don’t really do scouting outside of oppositional analysis, so I’ll go with a concept. Expected Goals was really one of the first major tools within analytics in the game that I grabbed onto. It first caught my eye through Michael Caley on twitter and then I started learning more and more about it. I have read StatsBomb for a very long time so a bunch of their early stuff sort of started to mold how I started to think about the game. But when Expected Goals burst onto the scene, particularly within analytic circles online prior to when it started to go more mainstream, I really liked the concept and the application of shot quality.

The first way I started to apply Expected Goals was when I was coaching youth. Particularly when playing larger drills in training, I would lay down some dots creating a “Goal Zone” and have added incentive for goals scored within the area. I wanted to train shot quality and create reinforcement to shoot from better areas, which turned out to be fairly successful as it helped limit the amount of long-distance shots and increase the amount of dangerous chances we would create. Now I particularly use it as a framework for other analysis I run, which is a massive part of a lot that I do.

Who/what is the player/concept you "missed" on? What did you learn from it?

I’m not sure on missed completely, but I had been trying to create a way to evaluate passing in a better way than just using passing% a couple of years ago. For our program at JMU, we get data from InStat and I had begun trying to create an Expected Passing like metric. At first, I had only gotten simple spreadsheets with numbers that are listed on their pdf reports or on their platform online, which included passes forward, backward, left and right. My first attempt was to find the average by position by each direction of pass and use that to create an xP like metric. It was okay, but it also wasn’t as great as I wanted it to be. Then I learned we can get the raw event data, so I got the program to buy access to it and have since been able to create an actual xP model.

With a lot of things, I tend to do, I will try to find possible improvements and fix them when possible. In this case, it was a having a lack of available data and coding knowledge, which I then figured out the data and coding and have a working xP model with women’s NCAA soccer. I think a massive skill is being able to constantly learn and improve, so even if you “fail” or “miss” on something be able and open to learn/grow from it.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

I would have definitely started learning computer science and programming earlier. I had started doing some analysis in excel, but then I realized how much more I could work with if I learned a programming language and started teaching myself python, which I now use on a daily basis.

Do you see player development as more of an art or a science? Is development on the club or the player? Why?

I have always thought that the art or human side of the game needs to be mixed with the science to open up top potential in players. Neither the science nor the art should be the be all end all, so being able to have both impacting player development in decision making, helping to improve technical quality, or other skill sets is of massive importance.

I believe that the clubs’ role is finding what each player needs and aiding in furthering the development of the player. But on the same hand, the club can only take a player so far in their development if the player does not put in more work on their own. So, a player needs to be able to take command of their own development as well to ensure that they are developing as a player.

What is your favorite sports moment? Why?

That’s tough because there are a lot of moments that are favorites…Within football, the first moment that I strongly remember is the 2006 World Cup and watching the Italians go on their run to winning it and was really the first moment I remember strongly and what pulled me into the game even more than just playing at a youth level. Then also watching the USWNT get back to grabbing the World Cup in 2015 and then adding a fourth star this past season was really cool.

Outside of football, I’d go for a couple of American football moments. The first strong sports memory I have overall, is being at and watching the university I currently attend, James Madison, win the 2004 1-AA National Championship. But also, as a New England Patriots fan, the two Super Bowl wins in 2014 season with Malcolm Butler’s goal line interception and in 2016 season with Tom Brady leading the 25-point comeback were also awesome moments after being so close to titles after the first three in four years from 2001-2004.

What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?

Pretty easy, right now it’s definitely Julian Nagelsmann. When he burst onto the scene in Hoffenheim I sort of gravitated to cheering for him because he has an unusual background in regard to getting where he did as coach, which is something I admire because I also don’t necessarily have a typical background. Even without that though, he has a big push with analysis (as his video board at training in Hoffenheim showed) and I enjoy his style of play.

Also, the USWNT across my lifetime has always been inspiring from both an on the field and off the field standpoint. Of course it’s amazing to watch your country win World Cups, but what I really like most is how much of an emphasis there has been on continuing to grow the women’s game. Even just in my shorter lifetime, the women’s game has grown massively and it has been something really cool to see and something I’d like to continue to be a part of.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into scouting/analytics?

I think the biggest advice is to start looking into questions that you’re interested in and creating some analysis. With that as well, learn some programming. A couple of really huge skills are knowing the game, having technical skills, and communicating insights in a digestible way. Wanting to answer questions was really the biggest thing I used when teaching myself python and lead to being strongly motivated to figuring out coding that I didn’t quite know how to do yet, but ended up being crucial to answering what I wanted to answer.

What is your favorite app/tool to use (for fun!)?

My two favorite tools are SportsCode and python. I could not live without SportsCode in the analysis I run for video and python I constantly use to create visualizations and insights for the team.

What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst? Why?

I’m going to go with python here again just because I feel that some of my work as an analyst took off once I started learning. This isn’t just within the data side but having the tool that I mentioned earlier to create a simple code to write some data into a SportsCode XML is amazingly useful to connect data and video processes together.